Nostalgia

I am in such a nostalgic mood! It's quite specific actually, and hearkens back to my childhood of watching awesome PBS shows. I, of course, loved Wishbone and Long Ago & Far Away, which is probably partially why I'm hyper literate now. Seriously if you want your kid to be the one who sneaks their light back on after bedtime so they can stay up until 1 am reading then breed them on those shows. Sadly they are now gone and we are left with Barney, Dora the Explorer, and Yu-Gi-Oh. Looking back I would definitely say that the early nineties were great for kid's television. There's nothing on PBS that's even close to the amazingness of Wishbone and Long Ago & Far Away now.

I actually re watched Wishbone not that long ago. I think that it's one of those shows better left in the past. It's so cool when you're a little kid, but when you're 18 you suddenly realize that the protagonist (Joe) was like, 12 years old and seems super young which is a bit disappointing because I remember him as all old and cool. It's also funny watching renditions of classic novels with a dog as the main character now, too. I seriously wonder how the actors were with that. It must have been the oddest experience ever to pretend that a silent dog was selling his soul to the devil or was their husband or something. Anyway, it lost a little of it's magic but is still super cool. Anyway I found the opening credits to it on youtube: Wishbone Opening.

Long Ago & Far Away holds up though. I re watched some of the taped videos recently and I'm still completely struck by the animation Svatohor. Svatohor may possibly be my favorite aside from The Wind in the Willows that they showed. It's so magical and dark but still beautiful and so completely Russian. The opening credits that I found on youtube feature it at the beginning: Long Ago & Far Away Opening. I wonder if there is anyway that Alex can capture the video from the video tape and put it onto a DVD-R. That would be so cool. Videotape doesn't last forever, after all and I'm always afraid that Mom will suddenly decide to throw it out in some mad cleaning spree.

Oh and the Wind in the Willows!! I absolutely love the claymation rendition of that story! There's nothing quite like it, and it really actually has no moral compass that I can see which makes it kind of bad ass. My favorite part is when Mr. Toad buys cars and keeps crashing them so they eventually put him in jail because he's a hazard to society in general and he has to break out to reclaim his mansion from the weasels who have taken it as their own. And then he, Badger, Molelie, and Rattie totally win and there are no further repercussions for old Mr. Toad. He learns no lesson and he is still the same incorrigible Mr. Toad.

And then there is what spurred all this memory. I was watching the second DVD of the Masters of Russian Animation series that I picked up at the Undergrad because I'm kind of a nerd. There where two that really struck me. I loved Hedgehog in the Fog and Crane Feathers. Crane Feathers was based on the old Japanese folk tale about the crane who was saved by a poor man and then she came back to be his wife and made silk for him to sell. She told him never to look in on her while she was weaving but one night he did only to find that she was a crane and to make the silk she was taking feathers from her own body. After finding his betrayal the crane left him. The end.

They both utilize old school animation methods because they were made in the '70's and I think it is so much more lush and seductive really than most animation you see today, particularly CGI which is so overused. I think that this is also why I'm such a fan of Michel Gondry's films. He does everything old school so it just seems to have more depth to me. I love computers, but they can never replace the old methods for me. There is something to be said for the hand drawn line, for layer upon layer of paint, for hand cut screens. This is probably why I'm not in graphic arts or industrial design. I am a studio artists, through and through. I don't think I could ever be anything else.

listening to: Emiliana Torrini--Fisherman's Woman